Menu

Tag Archives: story

In the middle of her interview with Coppola, Ariston Anderson asks him, “What is the one thing to keep in mind when making a film?” Coppola replies:

When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.

It’s great advice for writing short stories, too. And perhaps essays. And sections of books. I am going to try it out as I revise the first few sections of the boat book, now that I think I know what they should be doing and how they should be doing it.

I’d also like to try that advice in writing a short story: I should note that I was very inspired by my viewing of the Walker Percy film yesterday. What Percy did again and again was to observe life around him and try to capture it accurately. He didn’t reach for far away places and he didn’t reach into the past. The New Orleans of his novels was the New Orleans he knew.

In his wake I find I want to challenge myself to do much the same: to document as best I can the reality around me. Right now I am working on a book that’s about boats, but it’s also about the prairies, a place much mythified even by folklorists. (I just saw a film today that was about the country Mardi Gras, one day out of a year filled otherwise with trying to wrestle rice out of the ground.) After the countryside, it would be nice to turn to this small city in which I life, Lafayette, and capture it as it is, try to understand it as it is. It is much like other places, and it is also different from other places, but we can only those similarities and differences if we actually document them. Otherwise we are only working from a collection of so many personal anecdotes, which is poor stuff compared to a more organized study.

One of the awesome — in the original sense of *awe* — things about the web, and about blogs in particular, that is both like and unlike, say, the experience of literature, is coming across someone with sensibilities akin to your own. You get a sense of affinity sometimes with literature, especially in the realm of autobiography, but it’s a drawing toward. The thrill I sometimes get when I read someone in the middle of a project, in the middle of thinking, is drawing alongside them. We are peers in the sense that they write and I read and, in some cases, I write and they read. It’s not yet a thrill I have encountered in my scholarship, but perhaps I will one day.[^1]

This *drawing alongside* (a bit of Heidegger there in keeping with my newfound desire to return to my intellectual roots) is thrilling in the sense that one finds oneself in the company of like-minded others. More importantly, it is often the case that these writers are themselves struggling to articulate something themselves. Thus, there is a kind of drawing together in not yet knowing what one wants to draw.

Such is the case for me and the [Coudal Partners][cp] in general: they have realized my own love for notebooks in an actual, [ongoing commercial enterprise][fn], by creating the _Field Notes_ line of notebooks:

No, I don’t use them myself — I prefer a slightly larger notebook, as I have discussed elsewhere, but hey, CP, we can talk about it! — but all the trouble they’ve gone to get them right, and the fact that they are now in the offset printing business is something I find totally amazing.

What prompted this post, however, is eeriness of their current project, a film with the working title of [_Seventy-Two Degrees_][72]. The idea, and driving force, behind the film is this photograph:

When I showed it to my wife and described how “the picture” had become an obsession that transformed itself into a film project for the Coudal Partners, she laughed out loud, recognizing my own fondness for that particular era and that particular aesthetic. I have, in general, always been fond on high modernism, especially its European inflections and in some of the American manifestations of the fifties and sixties. I am also quite taken with the allure that technology held in that era. Before encountering this post, I had begun to re-read some old Alistair MacLean novels, having watched _Three Days of the Condor_ while at UCLA for the NEH seminar:

The folks at Coudal go one better in their research and turned up this great gem from the fifties: [“On Guard! The Story of SAGE”][film] by IBM Corporation, Military Products Division. (Really, you need to watch it — and *thank you*, [Internet Archive][ia].)

Where this takes me next … well, I have a few ideas.

For one, now that I am beginning to enjoy writing the boat book — I mean, actually looking forward to producing prose — I find myself thinking about what I would like to write next. Sure, some more work in this area might be possible: I’ve begun a dialogue with the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology and BOEMRE to extend my research on fabrication shops into larger shops that service the offshore industry. And I am also thinking about thinking about the nature of the creative dynamic within the Cajun and Creole music scenes in Louisiana. But I also find myself thinking about fiction writing.

More on that some other time.

[^1]: I would even, I think, change the subject and scope of my scholarship were I to find a partner, let alone a larger collaboration, with whom to work. Granted, the only way others will be able to find me is if I publish more. But I am not entirely sure that the pieces I have coming out in the next few years really represent what all I am interested in. Scholarship is such that we break off very small pieces these days. (Again, if I make this assertion it is up to me to find a way out of it.)

My friend Jason Jackson has edited a small volume of essays by Frank Speck, Negro and White Exclusion Towns and Other Observations in Oklahoma and Indian Territory: Essays by Frank G. Speck from The Southern Workman. It’s available for free from Connexions — see the link above. I was particularly caught by a passage from one of the essays:

While waiting at the railroad station at Chandler, Oklahoma, for a late train, a Negro, his belongings wrapped in a bandanna, inquired of me whether Stroud, a large town some distance to the east, was open to Negros. I replied with some surprise that I did not know, but asked him some questions, and in a short time I learned of the hostile feeling in many parts of the then territories which has given birth to the high-handed expulsive acts committed by both parties. As it proved, Stroud was a newly converted exclusion town and when the train arrived there Sam, who was of a determined nature, decided to learn for himself whether or not he could take the job of waiting in the hotel which had been offered to him. A large crowd of white men filled the station platform and Sam was immediately lost to view in a surrounding mass of inquirers, who were enforcing upon him in various ways the fact that it would not be “healthy” to stay over night there. I noticed, nevertheless, that he stayed. Stroud, as it was later rumored, had only recently turned anti-Negro and I learned that within two weeks the only family of resident Negroes, who persisted in their intention of braving the opposition, had been blown up with dynamite. “No lives lost, but the house demolished and Negroes ousted,” was the gist of the newspaper accounts.

The amount of talk circulating in the neighborhood after this “raising,” as they called it, let the light in on many other facts relative to the local race question. The neighboring town, where I happened to be, at once began casting side glances on the Negroes who thronged the streets on market days. Were it not for the fact that it lay in Indian Territory where Negro freedman have land rights and the numerical strength to hold their own, the outcome of public excitement might have been the same as at Stroud. Now the question is, in towns where both races still abide in tolerance how long will the balance be maintained? Feelings of antagonism through pride of character ought really to have little place in some of these villages….

It was the use of raising as a euphemism for terrorizing that caught my attention. There’s something more to be said about this, but I need a bit more time to think about it.

On the way to school this morning, Lily glimpsed a mourning dove: “Daddy, I saw a mourning dove.” And with that one observation, the following narrative unfolded:

“I think it was Butter, Daddy.” (I had dubbed two mourning doves that frequented our back yard last year, Butter and Garlic. Later, B & G were joined by a half dozen friends, who were all taking advantage of us dumping piles of bird food on the patio. Within a week a hawk turned up on Lily’s play set and the doves were seen less frequently.)

“Do you think our friends are still around, honey?”
“Yes, and they have a new friend, too!”
“Who’s that?”
“Toast!” Peals of triumphant laughter.

As our drive continued, it turns out that Butter and Garlic and Toast occasionally played with a hummingbird, but eventually that friendship disbanded in favor of a fourth mourning dove called Berry Bush. While B & G were boy birds, T and BB were girl birds. The occasional fifth bird, Greckle — who was not a grackle, was also a boy bird. They liked to play games in a field on Mount Vernon, the street on which we travel on the way to Lily’s school, and therefore won’t be far from our new home.

In the middle of the seventies, in the middle of our block, there was a house that for one month one summer sprung sprinklers on its roof. The water arced from three ordinary yard sprinklers that had been tacked to the roof but the effect was mesmerizing for adults and kids alike. It was like a southern gothic rendering of the kind of thing we had only glimpsed in films set in Las Vegas as the Rat Pack jetted from place to place. The show began in the morning and climaxed in late afternoon as the sun’s heat steamed the water on the back of the roof, forming a veil of droplets through which a rainbow sometimes ran. Each sprinkler kept its apparently assigned portion of the roof wet, with the excess water slowly dripping from the roof’s edge, looking like a continuous curtain.

Late in the afternoon, as the heat of the day hit its stride, adults in cars would slow and kids on bikes would stop to watch the show of cool water falling onto black shingles and turning into steam. It was a momentary spectacle in the large, flat space of the subdivision. Its aquatic curves were so unlike the straight-lined streets and sidewalks and driveways; its black asphalt shingles were comfortingly cool compared to the black asphalt of the street which could not, in the later afternoon, be walked on when barefoot — if you had to do so, you scampered across on tip-toe and leapt onto grass as soon as you could.

The house itself was otherwise indistinguishable from its neighbors: all were modest, pink brick ranch houses in a subdivision which was itself part of a wide ring of new subdivisions and shopping centers. Like rings on a tree, this particular fat ring marked the oil boom years of the late fifties and sixties. I remember the house so well because my own bike carried me under the dripping edge of the carport and the man responsible for the sprinklers being nailed to the roof was my father. While some kids in my neighborhood thought it was cool, a larger number of kids and adults — including those who stopped their cars, shook their heads, and drove on — were troubled by this seemingly irresponsible irruption of difference. Had the roof sprinklers lasted anything more than a month, one could have well imagined there being gatherings in kitchens and dens to discuss what must be done to return things to normal.

I was an impressionable twelve year old, too sensitive to such social undercurrents and yet, at the same time, utterly curious about anything that posed a problem that could be solved through thinking.

I came by this weakness, as some critics of young Hamlet imagine it, legitimately. I was practically raised to be this way. When I was five or six I disassembled my parents’ bedside clock. Instead of getting in trouble, I was encouraged to try to re-assemble it. When I was older, my father would talk me through his current project, whether it was pouring gasoline on ant piles in sufficient quantity so that when you lit it it would be sure to burn the queen or attaching some gizmo’s wires to the engine block in an attempt to conserve gas. My mother, who set her sights perhaps a bit lower but usually with better results, would ask me how I would like to lay out my room, using her own architectural skills to show me how certain configurations made the room feel bigger or smaller.

Some weekends we would return to my father’s rural roots and drive out of the city and deep into the country to my great-grandparents’ house. There I would eventually squirm my way off the couch, and out of my great-grandmother’s overly long narratives about cousins and aunts of which I could never keep track, and slip out the door, off the front porch, and down the gravel drive to my great-grandfather’s radio shack. He would have slipped out before me and would be sitting in front of a pile of radio parts, usually gazing back out of the shack through the open door or through the small, paned window that lit his workbench. The shack smelled of warmed radio tubes gone cold, the dry dirt of its floor, and my great-grandfather’s pipe as he sat there patiently pointing out radio parts to me.

Years later my father told me how practically everything my great-grandfather knew he either learned from experience or from the pages of _Popular Mechanics_. He was, for a good part of his life, an engineer, but not in the degreed sense of the word. He was, instead, an engineer in the sense of being good with engines, with machines that appear so complicated to others that they fear them. He loved them.

He loved them so much that he made them in his spare time, sometimes to solve problems that he encountered in his work. One of his many tasks at the sugar mill was to tap into its power system, a series of steam pipes that coursed under the ground. Unfortunately, there was no map of the piping, only fragile human memories about what pipe lay where and ran to what. So the job of running new taps involved digging a hole and a hole there until you struck gold in the form of a massive, hot iron pipe.

Having recently read about the principles of metal detection through changes in electro-magnetic fields in an issue of _Popular Mechanics_, my great-grandfather decided to build a machine that would make his life easier. And so one summer he pulled the spokes out of an old bicycle wheel, wrapped wires around it to form a coil, and then attached it to a box big enough to hold a battery and the necessary electronics to transform the changes in electrical signal into signals he could understand. His two foot by two foot by eight inch wood box — because none of these parts were small in the 1940s — had both a gauge as well as a set of earphones he had ordered from a catalogue. Box in hand, or in hands since it was by my father’s account both big and heavy, he easily found pipes and reduced the labor of the men who worked for Mr. Guidroz, as he was known at the mill, by half.

But such a magical machine was surely capable of more. Word spread of his “gold-finding machine” and it wasn’t long before men began to show up at the front door of his house at all hours of the day and night — because some quests are best left for the twilight hours when we believe we can see and understand more — asking if Mr. Felix, as he was known away from work, wouldn’t mind coming out and bringing his gold-finding machine with him. This time, they were sure, they had puzzled out a lost pirate treasure or a lost cache of Civil War gold. It was, they were sure, at the base of this tree and they only needed a little bit of help to make sure they were digging in the right place.

My great-grandfather, so far as can be remembered, never said no to any of these requests. He would always retreat back into the house, grab his hat and his machine, and return to be led away. He did, however, have one thing on which he always insisted in return for leaving his house and family on nights and weekends. When asked to come out, he would always say: “Okay, I’ll come. But I get a share and the machine gets a share, same as every man there. And I don’t dig.”

It’s not hard to imagine the series of transformations that took place in mens’ minds when they saw a wooden box with a bicycle wheel that could find where pipes lay in the ground and suddenly knew, just knew, that it could find other buried things. What better to be buried than gold? And so, for a short time on Weeks Island, there was gold to be found almost anywhere. A machine had made the place magical.

From the point of view of a small boy with an active imagination, such magical machines seasoned the Louisiana landscape. From the ditch cutters that could spew dirt twenty, thirty feet into the air to the hotboxes my grandfather made out of spare lumber and old windows to his adaptation of a garden rake to pluck grapefruit from the tree behind his garage, there seemed no end to what one could do if only you had the right device.

And clearly I was not alone in thinking this way. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father — our neighbor who had re-wired the horn of his Oldsmobile Delta 88 so he could work it from the dash — I was surrounded by men, and by women like my mother, who genuinely believed that the right combination of imagination and mechanics could produce wondrous results. No problem could withstand the onslaught of optimism and analysis it seemed to me.

It just so happened that in the seventies a wholly new problem had arisen for the dwellers in the rings and rings of suburbs that cities had perhaps too quickly grown. The oil embargo of 1973 and the later crisis of 1979 had made the cost of fuel do the unimaginable: it had gone up.

My father was not a man to take bad news in the form of a bill tallying what it took to cool our three bedroom ranch rental home lying down. Nor was he a man, however, prone to rash moves like raising the thermostat. No, there had to be a better way, and with that in mind, as well as the cheapness of water in a place where a good rainstorm flooded the carport, he made it a summer project to see if there was anything to be gained in the difference between the cost of water to cool the roof versus the cost of electricity to cool the house. In the first month, the savings were remarkable. In the second month, the water company had remembered to send a meter reader around and the experiment came to an abrupt, if also lamentable, halt. (To his credit, the water company assumes that all water consumed is also water taken away in the form of sewerage, so the system was stacked in favor of conventional uses and not attempts to play with the possibilities.)

Watering your roof to keep it cool might, at first glance, seem like a case of over-reacting. In the case of machines, you sometimes hear it said that something is over-engineered, which is a polite way of suggesting that there is too much solution for the problem at hand.

But such an appraisal ignores the fact that our house itself was under-engineered. Built during the energy boom years of the 1960s our house, like the hundreds that surrounded it in our subdivision alone, had little insulation and, worst of all, had little to no attic space. Its shallow-pitched roof nodded, in some fashion, in the direction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie-style homes without recognizing that none of those homes had been built in the subtropical torpor of south Louisiana. And the black asphalt shingles that covered roof after roof for as far as the eye could see were terribly good at converting light into heat. The result was that on most summer days, if you stood on a chair and pressed your hand to the ceiling — as children with active imaginations are likely to do — you could feel the heat from the attic through the gypsum board. In such a situation, watering your roof to keep it cool seems like a fairly reasonable response.

In any case, my father, while also possessed of an active imagination, could not be considered an amateur. He was a degreed and licensed architect with his own private practice who would go on to develop a rather ingenious solution for discovering, of all things, water traps in flat roofs. The idea was that where water stood, a leak was most likely to develop. He and his partner, an engineer, would hire aircraft to take infrared photos of their clients’ buildings at night and then my father would map the hot spots onto plans. In most cases, the hot spots revealed where water, which retains heat well, lay. With a marked-up plan in hand, their inspections on foot — which sometimes really meant hands and knees — could be much more targeted and with a higher probability of finding potential or actual problems.

I can’t help but wonder, now looking back, if one thing didn’t lead to the other, in some weird way.

The Amazing Crawfish Boat is available at your favorite bookseller (both Amazon and B&N). I have also released some additional free materials: audio versions of some of the chapters and photos — all available for download. Details are available on the book’s page.